The design for the complex of retail, apartment, office and hotel properties on a parking lot at East Fourth Street and Prospect Avenue is a spare, modernist structure with oodles of angles.

Schematic design of the proposed nuCLEus project in the Historic Gateway Neighborhood of downtown Cleveland got a thumb's up on Thursday, Jan. 15, from the city of Cleveland’s Downtown/Flats Design Review Committee.

The committee agreed to send the proposal for nuCLEus — designed by global architecture firm NBBJ and Cleveland-based Bialosky Partners — to Cleveland City Planning Commission for its meeting Friday, Jan. 16. However, the plan will need additional review before it gets its final OK, said Jennifer Coleman, chairwoman of the committee. The committee “in general liked what they saw” and accepted the idea of a 51-story apartment and condo tower in the two-tower concept of nuCLEus, she said. The design for the complex of retail, apartment, office and hotel properties on a parking lot at East Fourth Street and Prospect Avenue is a spare, modernist structure with oodles of angles. The other high-rise on the site would consist of 18 stories. However, Coleman, an architect, said the committee wants more “oomph in the design.” She said the building would be the fourth-largest on the city’s skyline, so it may need some elements to give it “a stronger statement” and perhaps some traditional elements to make it stand out on the horizon. The current design is more suited to an infill location among a cadre of skyscrapers as is found in Chicago, she said. Coleman called the present look of nuCLEus “a great design” but said it might be more suited to an area where it would have four or five skyscrapers in its immediate vicinity, which is not the situation in today’s Cleveland.

Cleveland-based Stark Enterprises and partner J-Dec Investments of Solon have proposed the nearly $400 million nuCLEus project since buying the parking lot next to Quicken Loans Arena last fall. Stark Enterprises has said it hopes to get at least a massive parking garage on the site finished in time for the Republican National Convention in 2016.

Designs for an eight-story building with student housing on the site of the former Jewish Community Federation Building at East 18th Street and Euclid Avenue near Cleveland State University did not do as well as the nuCLEus project. Clayco, a St. Louis- and Chicago-based real estate developer, announced plans for the site in January 2014. Coleman said the committee approved the footprint and massing plan of the student apartments. However, the committee wants to see more detail on the treatments of the building’s exterior before giving it a full schematic approval.